Families of North Yorkshire
The Cleveland Hills to the Dales, Whitby, Ripon, Scarborough, and the great moorland abbey country.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in North Yorkshire
- RobinsonSon of Robin, the Danelaw's favourite -son, and the first woman President of Ireland.
- ThompsonThe northern Thomases.
- HallAt the hall.
- MooreBy the moor, or sons of Mórdha; English heath and Irish sept under one Anglicisation.
- CookThe cook.
- FisherThe fisher, and the Bishop of Rochester at Tower Hill.
- HolmesThe holme, dry ground in the wet country.
- JacksonSon of Jack, the industrial north's signature.
- BennettBlessed Benedict, Lancashire knots it tight.
- MillerThe miller, water and wind before steam.
- SimpsonSimon's son, Tyne to Tees, and the Edinburgh obstetrician of chloroform.
- WaltonThe settlement of strangers, England mapped it eighty times.
- WebsterShe wove, northern -ster craft name.
- BatesBartholomew's short name, northern genitive.
- MortonThe moor settlement, marcher villages.
- BellOf the bell, locative, occupational, or pseudonymous.
- WilkinsonSon of little William, the northern patronymic that bored Watt's cylinders.
- HudsonSon of Hudd, the Yorkshire patronymic carried into Hudson Bay.
- DawsonSon of Daw, a Yorkshire patronymic.
- AtkinsonSon of Atkin, a name from the northern dales.
- SharpThe keen one, a nickname kept.
Historic ties to North Yorkshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in North Yorkshire.
- Captain James CookThe Yorkshire farm boy turned navigator who charted New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, crossed the Antarctic Circle, mapped the Pacific with a precision that lasted a century, and beat the scurvy that had killed seamen for generations.
- Thomas SpencerThe Skipton-born cashier whose three-hundred-pound partnership in 1894 with a Leeds market-stall trader founded the firm that became the largest retailer in modern Britain.
- Sir Henry PercyThe eldest son of the 1st Earl of Northumberland whose lifelong campaign against the Scottish wars of the late fourteenth century made him the most celebrated knight of his generation in the English-speaking world, immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry IV as the embodiment of chivalric honour.